


prettiest thing i ever stole

by haloud



Series: prettiest thing [1]
Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Criminals, Alternate Universe - Human, Canon-Typical Sexuality, Gun Violence, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-21
Updated: 2019-08-21
Packaged: 2020-09-23 01:34:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20331859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haloud/pseuds/haloud
Summary: Michael shot Alex's daddy dead, and it felt good, felt so good he knew he couldn’t do it again or else he might never stop finding men with loud voices and heavy hands to put down in the ground.





	prettiest thing i ever stole

**Author's Note:**

> an outlaw au inspired by ludo's "all the stars in texas" (which is also the source for the title). shout out to addy (seeaddywrite) and christi (christchex) for the <3
> 
> this fic is not for redistribution without express permission.

Jesse Manes was a mean bastard, and the whole town knew it. A military man down to his bones, he got shunted to the side for every single promotion after it came out he was hitting his wife. The years went by, and the man got meaner. Their mama left, and none of those boys of his grew up quite right, people said, and the town was glad to see them ship off too, one right after the other.

No one blinked an eye the day Manes turned up dead on his kitchen floor, a bullet in the back of his head. They turned up at his graveside and said he was a hero, then they turned up at the bar and said it was only a matter of time.

Alex Manes disappeared that same night, and people talked on that too. Either he was the one who did his old man in, or whoever did it did him in too; but that talk faded fast. Nobody was interested much in gossip about the littlest Manes boy, a subject all kinds of played out around the watercoolers of Roswell ever since word got around he was kissing on boys out behind the school.

So the Manes family legacy went like that. If Alex had been around to see it, he would’ve wished Jesse wasn’t dead after all, just so he could’ve watched it happen. Or maybe he would’ve made the town pay in blood some more for forgetting the ugliness they let go on right in front of them for all those years, thinking it wasn’t any of their business.

Alex wasn’t there to see it, though; he was busy leaving his family name behind for a boy in a beat-up pickup truck.

* * *

The gun came from foster number seven, a prepper freak with so much artillery he never even missed one little 9 mm. Michael locked it in the glove box, and it made his safe place feel a little more safe, made him a little more on the level with some of the ways the world wanted him hurt. He waited in the dark that night for the man to come after him with even more firepower, but the sun came up with him still alive, still armed.

That man had an accident while cleaning some other gun a few days later; Michael heard about it on the radio, since he hadn’t been back to that house. At sixteen, Michael had stopped caring where the foster system might put him next--at this point, it barely even mattered. Besides, who could care that a man was dead when that was the day Alex Manes actually noticed him in pre-calc? Their eyes locked as they jostled to beat each other for the one good desk in the back of the room, Michael’s ringed in a greening bruise, Alex’s ringed in heavy liner and concealer a shade or two too pale.

They split the desk after that; they split the textbook more often than not, because everything Alex owned was military-grade tidy, and Michael mostly lost things or just never had a chance to have them at all. They shared other things, too; food, homework, headphones, just once, when Alex followed Michael to his truck, crowded him into the bed, and held his legs in his lap so he couldn’t run away.

Then they started sharing words; then they shared a tool shed, and hands and skin and eager bodies..

Jesse Manes came to take that from them, and he took. He stole it, stole the most precious thing either boy had ever held, ripped them apart like it was his god-given right. He left Michael mangled on the dusty floor, and he dragged Alex out by his hair, back to the house he kept so clean and gleaming and pure.

But Michael stole for a living; stole to feed himself; stole to keep gas in his tank and clothes on his back. And he never got caught. And he’d never shot the safety he stole, but it turned out he didn’t need two hands to do it.

Alex stood in all that mess, blood and brains decorating the salmon-colored tile, sprayed high up on the gleaming stainless steel appliances, on the white walls. Looking at Michael like somebody who cared might’ve named him after an archangel, he wiped down the kitchen of fingerprints and evidence, quick and methodical, then he vaulted himself into the driver’s side of Michael’s old truck without even asking permission.

The only reason that house didn’t burn was because they couldn’t find the matches.

They cleaned up at a rest stop with soap and gauze Alex lifted from a Walmart that sat alone and hulking by the highway, and with Alex holding him it was okay, a little, for Michael to shake apart from the killing, for him to gag and howl and almost piss himself from setting and binding his hand the best they could.

Throughout it all, the whole horrible night, Alex stood sentinel beside Michael, who succumbed quickly to exhaustion and delirium, and he thought about the war he wasn’t going to fight anymore, and he relived again and again the crushing smack of the hammer, and the ringing crack of gunfire, and he held Michael’s head in his lap, and he smiled.

* * *

“Who taught you how to shoot a gun? Because you kind of suck at it.”

“Taught me? Nobody _ taught _ me, but you can learn an awful lot just by lookin’.” Michael smiled a lazy smile—he’d took some painkillers a while back, and without the hellfire in his hand and up his arm, he almost felt _ good. _ He glanced aside and let his eyes travel the length of Alex’s lean body, and he thought about how under all that black he looked like the boys in the magazines.

“Well, someone ought to. Teach you. Otherwise you might kill somebody someday.”

The light pleasure in that voice, the prom-night twinkle in those dark, dark eyes: it made Michael shiver.

Michael shot Alex’s daddy dead, and it felt good, felt so good he knew he couldn’t do it again or else he might never stop finding men with loud voices and heavy hands to put down in the ground.

Michael shot his daddy dead, and now Alex lounged against the cracked leather of his truck’s bench seat with his knees spread wide apart and his lips all smeared with sticky clear gloss, and he held that gun unloaded in his lap. That gun that was still hot the first time he touched it, when he eased it out of Michael’s shaking hand, when he fumbled on the metal and let it burn them both, brand them both at the very same time.

Over the years, in placement after shit placement, Michael had learned the ways men die and left them for dead too, quiet ways and loud ways, damn tragic and damn deserved. They choked on vomit in bar back rooms; they slipped away on the streets when winter came down. They huddled behind laundry machines that roared like trucks on the road, that shook like the whole world was ending, until the man stopped yelling and the screaming stopped and only, only silence followed, ringing, and his crying was broke so when he slipped out the back the night was quiet too.

He’d been quiet too long, now, so Alex filled the silence for him.

“Actually, don’t learn,” he said. “You should leave that bit to me. I was taught, after all.”

“You don’t have to—"

The words cracked out like a question, Michael’s voice flinching and young as he kept his eyes trained on the crumbling gray asphalt instead of on the beautiful boy beside him. If he touched the gun again, he might do something awful, like cry like a little baby. But he already made a choice with no going back. With Jesse Manes dead, Alex’s options were unlimited, the whole world big desert-sky blue, and Michael’d drive him anywhere he wanted, anywhere at all, for nothing more than a look from those dark, dark eyes.

“I know I don’t have to. Most people will give up anything at the threat they might get hurt. No bullets needed, just the suggestion of them. But you should leave it to me anyway; I’ve got steady hands.”

One of those steady hands touched Michael’s knee, light at first then, when Michael didn’t pull away, solid and hot and heavy, thumbnail worrying at a thick ridge in the stitching. They flashed past a faded green sign: fifty-two miles ‘til Farwell and the state line. They had three nights’ motel fare in change and small bills stuffed underneath one of the back seats and all else Michael owned in a fraying duffle bag.

In a couple hundred miles or more, they’ll be out of the desert proper and out of gas and out of money, and they’ll coast into a rickety dead-end gas station where Alex will swing his long legs out of the truck and hop down off the seat, and his too-small t-shirt will flip up at the back and reveal the gun tucked in his waistband. But the attendant will be passed out in a puddle of Jack, not even coming to when Michael shoves him over out of his seat just to check if he’ll pop up swinging. Alex will linger over the counter, hand behind his back, and when the man stays still he’ll lick his lips and keep his hand on the gun regardless.

Michael will clear out the till, and someday they’ll call it a beginning.

But before all that, Michael tipped his head back and closed his eyes until Alex’s stroking hand put him to sleep. It was less comfortable than what Michael wanted, which was to pull off under the stars and zip them both into his sleeping bag, knocking knees and breathing each other’s breath and trapping himself in a cage of vinyl and muscle and bone. It wasn’t what he wanted, but Alex let him sleep ‘til Texas, and the nightmares never came.

When he woke they were stopped, the truck wedged into a parking spot in between a nondescript sedan and a busted-up camper in front of the _ Ala-mo-tel. _Alex had the gauze mitt of Michael’s left hand cradled in his lap, just where the gun was sitting hours and hours back.

“I didn’t mean it like that, about your hands,” Alex said as soon as Michael’s eyes rolled open, before he could even make them focus on how gentle Alex held him. He must’ve been waiting for who knows how long that he couldn’t stop the words from falling out as soon as he detected the tiny rhythm shift of Michael’s breathing.

“’S fine,” Michael managed through his gummy throat, and he groped with his fingertips for the water bottle by his foot so he could snag it without moving an inch away from Alex.

“It’s not. But we’re going to be. We’re going to be okay.”

They got a room from a guy who didn’t even glance at Michael’s shitty fake ID, a room with a shower and no roaches they could see. They sat on the bathroom tile and let water get all over the floor so they didn’t have to be apart for even a single second, not even to get clean. Alex curled his elegant hands in the hem of his black t-shirt and stripped it off slowly, stomach and chest flexing in the washed-out fluorescent light, and the collar raked through his hair and made it stick up in the back. Michael watched, mesmerized, as Alex popped the button on his jeans next, slid them down his legs and slid his briefs down at the same time, until he was standing there naked and raw in a way he hadn’t even been their first time.

“If you take a picture, it’ll last longer,” Alex said, face half-turned away as he checked the heat of the shower instead of looking Michael’s way, and Michael reached out for him, wrapping his fingers around Alex’s ankle, making him jump when Michael touched a gentle kiss to the delicate skin behind his knee.

“I’ll only need a picture if you’re saying you’re not gonna be mine from now on,” he said, following the kiss with the tip of his tongue, tasting salt and the slightly coppery tang of water out of old pipes.

“Oh, I’m yours, alright.” Alex stayed staring in the middle distance, but he smiled then, and reached down to twine his fingers in Michael’s hair. “Finders, keepers.”

Once the water got hot enough, Alex held Michael’s head under the stream and scratched his chipped black nails over and over again through Michael’s curls; he soaped them both up with his shirt, careful, so careful not to get Michael’s dressings wet. Michael kept his eyes open the whole time, and let them sting.

“D’you think they’re looking for us?” he asked, right after they turned off the lights and both their heads hit the pillow, so close he could feel the leftover heat from the shower radiating off of Alex’s skin. He shifted closer on the scratchy sheets, until their foreheads rested together and he could press his lips to Alex’s damp cheek instead of waiting for an answer.

“We’ll know soon enough if we start hearing about a murder or reading it online, but I’m not scared.”

“You’re not?”

“Nah. He was gonna kill me anyway. Either right there or by letting somebody else do the job in basic. At least this way I’ve got you.” Alex’s hand closed around Michael’s good wrist, and he whispered, “Let me show you, let me show you how you don’t have to be scared.”

Alex could have told him all about the plans his mind ironed flat and neat while Michael slept, haloed in evening sunlight with his cheek mashed against the window. He could have fetched the gun and stripped it right there on the stained bedspread and showed Michael everything his daddy taught him about killing. There were a hundred different practical ways Alex could have spent what could’ve been their last few hours, but he spent them another way instead.

He threw his leg over Michael’s hips and bore him down, down onto the squeaking box spring, steady hands slipping on his skin to touch more of him, all of him, rolling their hips together and holding Michael, his Michael, holding him tight with his hand splayed all across Michael’s freckled back while Michael shivered and shook and spent between them. And then he kissed them back to sleep again with lips that were sore and bitten and chapped, but he couldn’t stop smiling, because he knew that he was holding on to Michael’s wrists, and the hands that killed his daddy, and only kisses would bruise his mouth ever, ever again.

* * *

“I’m not scared,” Michael said two weeks later, in the bed of the truck while Alex knelt up behind him to cut his hair. “We make a good team, don’t we? I thought—but I’m not scared anymore.” And regardless of the scissors in Alex’s hand, Michael settled back against his thighs and tipped his head back to nuzzle into his stomach.

Yeah, Michael thought. He thought about futures; he thought about consequences. He tried to get Alex to go outside of Canyon, tried to leave him the truck and all the money and just one kiss for the road—he laid out a whole road map he saw for Alex’s future, a future where Alex left him behind, a future without him in it. And when he spoke he spoke with shining eyes and shaking lips and his hurt hand cradled to his chest, right over top of his heart.

But Alex watched him; watching him was the only habit Alex had left. He flinched at slamming doors; he flinched at sirens in the distance, and Alex watched and Alex _ knew _him, as well as he knew himself. So when he offered every night to turn himself in so Alex could get back home and graduate and get his life back to any kind of normal place—every night they were at a motel Alex would walk out the door, and every night they were in the truck he walked down the road. He walked away and he counted to one hundred, and then he turned around and walked back, to the sound of televisions blaring behind cardboard-thin walls, to the sound of cicadas screaming.

Every night, Alex walked back, and Michael would collapse against him with red-rimmed eyes and only one hand that could clutch his shirt like a scared little kid, and every night, Alex said, “This is all that’s going to happen if I go home or if you run away. Me coming back to you.”

And Michael folded into Alex’s chest like a collapsing star, like a branch on a rushing river caught against a rock.

In the early evening, Alex kissed Michael’s forehead and set the scissors aside in favor of draping them both in the battered old sleeping bag, making them cuddle up tight so it fit around both their shoulders. The sun was starting to set, but it still looked high off in the distance with the world laid out flat and gold and swaying as far as the eye could see but for the violet smudge of the mountains on the horizon, and for a moment Alex pretended he had no idea where they were.

They talked all through the deepening blue and into the lavender dusk. They talked of how to go about stealing a guitar next, and the songs they would play for each other. The bottoms of the clouds caught fire, and Alex practiced chords on the inside of Michael’s thigh, and Michael said that if Alex wrote him a song, he’d steal the money and get it tattooed, right there.

The stars came out, dizzying and bright.

They kissed in the cold night, Michael’s shoulders naked against the icy metal, a sharp counterpoint to the feverish pounding of his heart. They kissed until they couldn’t anymore, too shivery and sensitive to go on, and then they made up their bed in the back of the truck and found themselves kissing some more.

They slept out in the open; they slept in each other, all closed in; and they called it home.

* * *

Jesse Manes was a mean bastard, and his boys were too busy being war heroes to come to his funeral. If they’d been there, someone might’ve cared enough to ensure the investigation went right, that justice got served—for a Manes definition of what justice might be. But the town buried him instead, and then they moved on a little happier, all around.

Michael and Alex moved on too. Alex started reading crime statistics reports, but the needle didn’t shift at all. The gun stayed in the glove box, except when somebody just needed to see reason. Michael’s hand got better, though it never set quite right, and sometimes Alex would kiss his crooked fingers and have to go off on his own for a while.

He always came back to kiss Michael’s crooked hands again.

Once every year, Michael and Alex came home to the desert, to sit under stars just unlike the stars anywhere else in the world, and Alex would play music, and Michael would hum along. 

And Michael would say, “I bet I could build us a house here; I bet I could do that for you.”

And, every time, Alex would reach for their almanac, and find their next destination, with stars they’d never seen before.

**Author's Note:**

> discord @ haloud  
tumblr @ cosmicsolipsism


End file.
